


He found my Being—set it up

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Latin, Love Letters, Marriage, Romance, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-25
Updated: 2016-11-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 05:36:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8652898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: She was the scholar of the family, even if no one could say it in front of poor Jimmy.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mira_Jade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mira_Jade/gifts).



She was supposed to be scandalized to receive the blotted letter, in Frank’s crabbed hand, but she wasn’t, not at all. It could hardly be called a letter properly, since he’d only added a few precious lines to those he’d borrowed from Catullus, who was himself so obscene she only knew about him because she’d stolen a slim volume from Frank’s satchel and had read it, shuddering with delicious shame, over a few days before his distress at missing the book and worrying over who had taken it made her relent and give it to Jimmy to return; her brother was, frankly, a dullard and took no interest in the book itself, so she didn’t fret for a moment that her parents or Eliza would find out what she had read. She wasn’t as fine a Latin scholar as Frank, so she had not read all the poems before she returned the book and those she had, she’d struggled with but oh! what delight in comprehension! To be given another opportunity to read the lines, to let the splendid, sonorous syllables fill her mouth like Belinda’s best pulled candy, “… _dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,/ conturbabimus illa ne sciamus_ …” was a gift Frank had understood she’d want but she wasn’t sure he truly grasped how stirred she would be by the prospect of the innumerable kisses and how she would try to imagine receiving them, to be herself Lesbia and he the ardent poet, the boy she knew and somehow the Roman writer bathed in a foreign light, half-glare, half-glow, the noonday sun and moonlight a potent admixture. 

Emma had hidden **that** letter away from the others, the ones she tied with a frayed pink silk ribbon and kept in a marquetry chest, those she might leaf through with Eliza carefully watching or Alice gazing as if she were a great lady indeed. This letter was something no one else would understand and she wouldn’t risk its discovery, watching it fly apart like the scattered black feathers of a savaged crow if her older sister or her mother found it to burn it before her. She gave it to Belinda, who couldn’t read it if she wanted to, who wouldn’t betray her even if she could, the only one who understood secrets and how some messages were forbidden but still so incontrovertibly necessary. Emma had memorized the letter by the time she gave it to her mammy, but she still liked to know it was safe, that she could ask for it and read it on a sunny afternoon, tucked within the leaves of a proper book, maybe Wordsworth or Carlyle, sitting in the leafy shadow of the veranda. She would know she could never be ravished now that she had read it, but that there could still be,  would be rapture with Frank Stringfellow, even if he finished seminary and she was forced to be a minister’s wife, to give up lace and whimsy and everything worldly and frilled. To be Mrs. Stringfellow, there would be poetry, a marvelous filthy Latin for him to whisper to her, and she would be able to use her most polite expression, the work of hours of remonstrance from her mother and elder sisters, to conceal her brazen response, so that no one would guess what the minister spoke of to his dear wife and why she sighed, so often and so beautifully, her eyes downcast and hidden.

**Author's Note:**

> I must be fair and write a gift-fic for our other new writer of Mercy Street fic, Mira_Jade. I tried to put together a little story that reflected all your research about the real people behind Mercy Street, without doing that much research of my own, and incorporating your version of Emma Green.
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson. The poem quoted is from Catullus 5 and the translation is "Then, when we have made many thousands,/ we will mix them all up so that we don't know," and is it arguably one of his most famous, though not quite most salacious, work.


End file.
